This month’s Music Book Review is another in the fantastic Story Orchestra series of books. I love this series, which takes famous pieces of classical music – some opera, some ballet, some orchestral music – and through either telling the story behind the opera or ballet, or writing a story to go along with the music, and combining that, Jennifer Courtney-Tickle’s beautiful illustrations and excerpt from the piece that each book is based on, the books bring the music to life for young readers.
I have read quite a few of this series of books, and if you are interested in reading more about the other books in the series, please click on the links below. This book is all about the story behind Peter and the Wolf by Romantic Composer Sergei Prokofiev, who was from the country we now know as Ukraine.
Join Peter and Sofia on an adventure into the forest in this retelling of the classic fairy tale. When a wolf threatens a little bird, a duck and their grandfather’s cat, can Peter and Sofia put their fears aside and save them?
And so begins our tale based on the story behind Prokofiev’s music, Peter and the Wolf. This book brings Prokofiev’s’s music to life for young children, by telling the tale of Peter and Sofia who go out to play in their grandfather’s garden. The children watch a duck and a bird squabbling with each other, and being stalked by their grandfather’s cat. The grandfather warns the children to be careful and asks them what would they do if they came across a wolf. One child goes back inside with the grandfather, but Peter is having too much fun and runs off to continue playing with the animals in the forest. You will have to read the book to find out what happens.
It is an excellent introduction to this beautiful and fun piece of music- one that once was so much a favourite of my son’s and he got us to play it so very often that at one I could not stand to listen to it any more. Then he discovered something else to watch/listen to over and over and I could bear to listen once more! We had to play Peter and the Wolf- he was always Peter strangely – and very much enjoyed tying “the Wolf” aka mummy or daddy up and taking “the Wolf” off to the hunters…As Disney has also done a version of this story, and it is a piece that often finds its way into concerts aimed at a family audience, you may well recognise this piece if you think you don’t know it yet when pressing the quaver note symbol (quarter note, for my American readers) to hear excerpts from the music alongside the story:
Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is absolutely an excellent piece to listen to with children. It is a story about a rebellious child, it features animals, and musically it is a really good piece to get children interested in the music. Prokofiev employs themes played on different musical instruments to represent each character, so you can ask your children to listen out for, say, the duck and talk about what instrument is used to represent the duck. For older children you can talk about how the musical theme has been written to represent that animal- does it sound high and fluttering like the bird, for example. You could ask your children to pick one of the animals or characters from the story and whenever they hear their theme, they could pretend to be that character. You could ask them to draw a picture representing a scene from the piece. There are many ways you can use this piece of music to fire up your child’s imagination, and this book is a great springboard into the music. If, after reading this story book, you would like to listen to more of this piece of music, then I can recommend listening to the following recording which you can do by visiting Spotify, though it will be available on various other platforms, wherever you get your streamed music.
At the end of the story, the book gives you a glossary defining some of the terms used either within the story itself or the description of each of the musical excerpts on the following page that your children may not be familiar with, such as “chromatic”, “tremolando” and “dissonant”. There is also a very short biography for the composer along with a very brief introduction to the opera itself and a little historical context about the ideology of the times when Prokofiev wrote this work. Finally, you can hear all of the different excerpts from Peter and the Wolf in one place on the final page of the book. For each excerpt, there is a short description of the music as well as information about where in the piece you can find this particular excerpt.
Would your child enjoy this book? Well as always, you know your child best and there are some elements of this particular book that some children could be a little frightened by – here Peter ignores his grandfather’s sage advice and finds himself confronted by a wolf, and at one point the wolf does swallow the duck whole. I don’t think that it is too scary, the way it is done in this book, but one of my children may have worried about this aspect of the story when they were younger. In terms of understanding the story, I would say that depending on whether you are reading this to your child, or they are reading it for themselves, this is a great book for children aged 5 to 8. Of course, with buttons to press to listen to the music, that has always been a winner in my house from when my children were very small. And the buttons are quite light touch as well, meaning that even small children year would be strong enough to press it and get the music to play.
At the time of writing the book is available from Amazon (and other retailers) priced at £13.25, though you should always bear in mind that the prices in Amazon fluctuate with demand. The book is also available from many other book retailers.
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